


solo tengo esta vida

by obliviscere



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Existentialism, Hogwarts, Slice of Life, Stress Relief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-28 19:39:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12613944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obliviscere/pseuds/obliviscere
Summary: Christopher ran away his fifth year of Hogwarts... and now he's back for his sixth year. The professors just accepted that he was back. Now he has to readjust to Hogwarts life, get back into his friendship(s).





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi y'all. I write this when I'm stressed out from classes, and I'll upload every 2000-3000 words or so at a time. The summary is pretty accurate, but I'm just letting this story go. Be prepared for some heavy themes about existentialism and nihilism, ethical questions, pseudo-philosophy, questions about the nature of friendships, untrust & trust in friendship, suburban culture & the loss of culture in America (the setting is only incidentally Hogwarts; nothing matters), sexuality, gender, and purple prose galore (that I can pretend to rationalize). (Run on sentences are part of the experience.) There will also be some pretty heavy drug use (for reasons you'll hopefully see soon), and I hope to be able to develop these characters A LOT since there's really only two (Christopher, the narrator, and Mauricio) who I want to present often. If y'all have any suggestions for funny scenarios they can get themselves into, throw them out to me. This is post-war, really few references to the main cast, some of them might visit for a shitty joke or something. I'm gonna be including basically anything that I know, so hopefully it will have (probably untranslated for the aesthetic & i think having an unintelligible element to some is interesting and pretentious and meaningful) Spanish, Italian, French, Latin, references to literature (both real and fake, both of the "high" and "low" arts), and hopefully other languages -- if you suggest a language for me to use, I will try my best to incorporate it in a meaningful way. I will obviously learn a bit of the language first, consult with native speakers somehow. I will use it respectively or I will not use it.
> 
> Hope you enjoy y'all! ~

            “I’ve been talking to some ghosts these days,” Mauricio said. We sat down on the ledge of the astronomy tower, overlooking the Forbidden Forest. There was no moon, so it seemed like an expansive ocean, black, ever-shifting as one’s mind tries to make sense of this emptiness; _there has to be something in this image,_ one’s mind reasons. “I had taken a quarter of Xanax, I was getting ready for bed, and suddenly I was just like… outside the dorms? I was on the fourth floor.” It was just homogenous blackness. No information to extract from the image tonight. On other nights, when the moon was at its fullest, he could see individual centaurs, sometimes a strange, sideways-moving creature shifting from tree to tree. “And Nearly Headless Nick was just rambling onto me about _something_ so I’m trying to piece together what he’s fucking going on about and suddenly the _Grey Lady_ comes floating the fuck over.”

            “What was he talking to you about, though?”

            “I have no idea. I was just like, well Nick, I’m off to bed, I’ve got an eight am tomorrow.”

            “Do you think he knows what that means?”

            “An eight am?”

            “Yeah, like, he’s probably so detached from our academic life. He’s more like, just part of the entertainment value of Hogwarts.”

            Mauricio tilted his head at me and rolled his eyes. He pulled out a blunt and lit it. “And then,” he said, “the same thing happened the next night.”

            “Shit, dude.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Why me? Why Mauricio Mendez?”

            “Why only Xanax?”

            “Do you think this brand just like, attracts ghosts to the consumer?”

            “Maybe you release weird ghost-attracting pheromones.” Down at Hagrid’s hut, smoke was curling out of the chimney.

            Mauricio passed the blunt to me. Our fingers touched, and then he clasped my free hand entirely in his. “I’ve missed you,” he said. “It’s been pretty shitty.”

            I squeezed once, and he let go. “So you’re selling now? When did that begin?”

            “April. I needed money. I had the time. The classes were jokes last semester.”

            “And where d’you keep them now? The plants.”

            “I bought one of those bags that you can like, walk into. A walk-into bag. Charmed it up with some basic anti-smelling charms that we’ve been doing for years. Bam. I set up some lights in it, it’s solid.” He pulled on a pouch attached to his belt. “We can check it out, if you want.”

            “Hell yeah.”

            I put the blunt out and we went into his pouch. It was pouch with an Undetectable Extension Charm, that’s what it was called. I knew I could get someone to sew him a better bag, and I could charm the hell out of it. The inside was dark, damp. As soon as we entered, dank, like an actual hit. I smile at him. There were twelve plants on two tables, plastic tables, like the ones that my family would use for parties. They were tall, taller than me, and completely full. “This is money,” he said. “This is real money, in my hands.”

I followed Mauricio to the back of the room, just about twelve feet in. The room was clean, I expected nothing less of him, but there was wear and tear that was just unavoidable (without another charm). He waved his wand, and the wall in front of us parted down the middle, revealing about five more feet of the room that held weed. Piles of weed, like a silo, all threatening to topple over. “Money,” he repeated. He looked at me then. “Is this scary?”

“I’m not scared,” I said. “I cannot say if it is scary or not, I am not god.”

 “Same old you.”

            “Yes. Same old you.”

            This, I thought, actually caught him, because for an instant his eyebrows furrow, and then he recovered. Not offended, just surprised; hadn’t thought about it. “Do you think?” he asked.

            “I don’t think anyone can change much from their core aspects.”

            “That makes me nervous.”

            “That’s why I believe it, because it’s so awful. It must be true.”

            We left the pouch and finished up with the blunt. “I make five hundred dollars daily,” he said. “It’s… incredible. I can do whatever I want. I never knew this kind of freedom before.”

            Later on, when we parted for the night, I clasped his hand and squeezed it. “I missed you, too,” I told him. I could never tell what he was thinking. Could I tell what anyone was thinking? “I’ll see you tomorrow in class.”

            “Goodnight, Christopher.”

 

I decided to microdose in the morning, because I hadn’t access to drugs in months. It hit me forty-five minutes later, as I was slowly pushing oatmeal into my mouth, washing it down with coffee. It was curling out of my stomach, scaling upward through my ribs like vines. Mauricio appeared behind me, squeezed the part where my neck meets my shoulder. “Are you ready for syllabus bullshit?” he asked.

            “Not really,” I said.

            He sat down beside me and picked at the berries in my oatmeal. “We could just chill by the lake.”

            “I think Corvo would kill us.”

            “She won’t even care. Her and I got tight last semester. She told me about becoming an animagus.” He moved just a bit closer, cupped his hands around his mouth. In a mock whisper, “She said she wasn’t registered for twelve years, so she had to fake the process for the Ministry of Magic.”

            “Wild.”

            “Wild, indeed. We’ve got some interesting staff here, dude.”

            “Do you think we can go to Transfiguration now? It’ll be like, fifty minutes.”

            “Your peak’ll pass by then. You only micro’d, right?”

            “How d’you know?”

            He tossed a raspberry at my face. “People don’t change,” he said, and then got up. I followed him out of the Great Hall, and then outside. “Let’s just hang out by the lake, I know you’ve read the whole syllabus and done the first week’s homework already.”

            “Have you?”

            “No, but I don’t really care.”

            We went down by the lake. It still smelled like summer. My father always told me to take advantage of these days. They’re the only ones you’ll remember, he had told me. I tried to think back to every memory that the smell of summer brought to me.

             “I’m trying to learn how to jinx my weed,” Mauricio said, “so that if someone snitches, I’ll know who it was.”

            “Do you already have some spells in mind?”

            “No. The thought came to me last night.”

            “Did you see Nearly Headless Nick again?”

            “No, last night I spoke with one of the paintings on the sixth floor.”

            “Xanax?”

            “Sober.”

            “Of your own will?”

            “A faint tug of destiny, perhaps?”

            “Aren’t they mutually exclusive, free will and destiny?”

            “The painting said that Hermione Granger –”

            “Wow.”

            “Shh. That Hermione Granger used a very similar jinx when they restarted Dumbledore’s Army.”

            “Did this painting person tell you the jinx?”

            “Of course not,” he said. “That would be all too fucking simple. As soon as he was about to say it, it was like some shitty fucking movie. Bam, gone. Just gone. I’m telling you, he just disappeared from the painting. It was weird.”

            “You were sober?”

            “I was sober.”

            “I’m not sober.”

            “Oh jeez, you’re not, I kinda forgot.”

            “It’s fine. I’m good. I want to play with the giant squid in the lake.”

            Mauricio touched his fingertips to my shoulder. “Don’t do that.”

 

We sat through Defense Against the Dark Arts as the teacher tried to impress us with interesting hexes performed on his assistants. Boil hexes and bat-boogey and stuff that children do, that any real duelist would be ridiculed for throwing upon their opponent. Mauricio didn’t pay attention, but I at least kept my eyes on this man. We were Sixth Years, I wanted to say. We have such little time to learn. Teach us how to defend ourselves, for I want to leave this idle existence as quickly as possible. A Utopia in the middle of the countryside is appealing for only so long. Others would kill to spend even one year here, and I had left, squeezed myself out of the first crack that I could fit through.

            “Mauricio, would you like to demonstrate a hex on our dear assistant here?”

            Mauricio, who had been studiously sketching a comic, grabbed his wand from the side of his leg without looking up. He flicked his wrist, quick as a hummingbird’s wings, and a purple spark snapped out at the poor girl.

            I didn’t want to go to herbology after that, but Mauricio felt obligated to see Professor Longbottom. “Are you fucking kidding, dude?” he said. “Skip the fucking legend’s class? You would disrespect him like that? Not show up to the fifty-minute lecture that he spends two weeks planning for and he still messes up each time somehow? What the fuck else are you gonna do with those fifty minutes, dude? Go to the fucking lake? Play with the fuckin, the giant squid?” Here he wiggled his fingers in front of his face, maybe mimicking the squid’s tentacles. “Arrggg, I’mma… I eat fuckin, I eat piece of shit, disrespectful, petulant children like that fuckin douchebag Christopher.”

            “The giant squid fucking loves me, fuckass.” I stopped at an intersection in the hallway, where I would turn to go back to my dorm or we would continue towards Longbottom’s class. “Do you seriously want to go?” I asked. “I’m fucking, I don’t know, I’m just not feeling that hot.”

            “I’m still gonna go,” he said. He sobered up. “Herbology’s kinda cool.”

            “Cool?” I asked. And then, dawning on me, “He… helped you grow weed?”

            “No.” I stared at him. “Just a little. I asked really indirect questions. I leave weed places sometimes and sometimes it just magically transfigures into a money, transfigures into some rare magical fertilizer. It’s weird. Hogwarts, right? Totally not an actually person doing that.”

            “Definitely Hogwarts thanking you for bringing capitalism into its walls.”

            “Did the Weasleys – bless his dead soul – not bring capitalism into these walls first with their business? I am following a tradition of enterprise and entrepreneurship.” I wasn’t sure if he actually believed that. “Do you think what I’m doing is bad?” I couldn’t tell if he was serious. I searched his face for clues, because something felt off; I felt no assuredness with him, ever. Did he want a serious answer? Everything he said could be contradicted in his thoughts. Mauricio pointed towards the greenhouse. “I’m leaving in a minute. I just remembered you’re tripping pretty hard, right?”

            “Right,” I said, suddenly remembering as well. “I think I will go wherever you go for right now.”

            “I’m going to herbology.”

            “I will go to herbology, as well.”

            “O-kay Mis-ter Ro-bot.”

            “I’m sort of freaked out for some reason?” I said as we began to walk towards the greenhouse. I could see the Forbidden Forest in the distance, a few thestrals strolling in the shadows at the very far edge. They stared at me. I stopped. “They’re looking,” I said.

            “Shut the fuck up.”

            “The thestrals, they’re looking at me.”

            Mauricio turned around and followed my gaze into the forest. “They’ve missed you.” He pinched my cheek. “Did any of the teachers say they missed you?”

            “No.”

            “What pricks.” He started walking again, and I followed. He said, “I bet Longbottom’ll say something to you.”

            Our legend of a herbology teacher did not say anything to me. I kept my head steadily down on the syllabus, which each student took turns reading from. I read aloud that we are not allowed to use the greenhouse without permission from Professor Longbottom, but Professor Longbottom is more than willing to find space in the greenhouse for any plants. Mauricio and I did not even have to look at each other.

            After herbology, I said, “I need food.” But when we went to the dining hall, everything seemed disgusting to me. I picked at a croissant, but I ended up just pushing it towards Mauricio. “You should get outside,” he said, shoving the rest of the croissant in his mouth. “We’ll go down to the forest. Smoke a joint.” I had to look away.

            “Ginger ale,” I said to my glass, and it filled up. “I prefer smoking at the very end of the trip.”

            “I’m gonna go smoke anyway.”

            “I’ll still go with you, I just won’t smoke.”

            “Sure.”

            We got up and walked down towards the forest, but Hagrid was giving a class on some bullshit or other right in the middle of the field, so there was no way we could get into the forest. We went back inside and joked about going into the shrieking shack. “There’s a passage near the Womping Willow we found last year,” Mauricio said.

            “We?”

            “Some kid and me.”

            “Oh.”

            “It was pretty scary, especially coming back. We kinda just had to run. The guy almost got like, smashed. Straight up.”

            “Shit, dude.”

            “Shit, indeed.”

            “Okay, so where do we go?” I asked.

            “The astronomy tower?”

            I said, “Holy. Fucking. Christ. I do not feel like walking all the way to the fucking astronomy tower.”

            “The trophy room. Who the fuck goes to the trophy room?”

            “Um…”

            And then Mauricio started to pull out the blunt. He would just light it right there, that would solve the problem. “Can’t we just smoke inside your pouch?” I asked.

            “I don’t wanna smell it up.”

            “I’ll get you a new one,” I said. “I’ll start tonight, in there.” I opened my backpack and showed him yarn and needles. “I’m fucking prepared, I studied the uh, the fucking, Undetectable Expansion charm and I researched a shitton about Anti-Odor charms that take fucking centuries to decay. Literally centuries. Like, for some reason, we just know a _shitton_ about this type of charm.”

            “Wild. You just have yarn?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Yeah, we can totally do that then,” he said.

            So we went to his dorm and he placed the bag on his bed and we got inside. There was something eerie about the pouch. The filtered air, the floodlights. We went to the back, where the weed was, and closed up the wall between us and the plants. “We’ll at least try to keep it as far away from the entrance as possible,” he said. “I always forget to charm the smoke away.”

            We smoked, mostly in silence, passed the blunt back and forth with minimal glances. After we finished, I said, “It’s different now. I feel like… I feel like I’m in an extremely liminal zone.”

            “We’re in a silo of weed,” he said.

            “I feel like I am on the verge of change.”

            “Potential energy?”

            “I feel as if I have wasted my life, and now I am here. Why should the teachers care about us? There are thousands of us, each year. They know millions. Why do I matter, one in that million, when there are so many more people worthy of their attention?”

            Mauricio said, “Teach yourself what you need to know. You already do that.”

            “I know, but if they were guiding me in useful directions, we could learn so much more. You could study weed farming.”

            “I do study it.”

            “But you could have a mentor – mentors are the most beneficial experience someone can have. You are an exception to this, as you have functioned extremely well on your own, but mentors are so useful. I know it’s hard to imagine, but you could make this even more efficient.”

            “If I can do it,” he said, “anyone can do it. I’m not special.”

            I whisked away the smoke, and then started making small sparks with my wand. I did some complicated tricks, made a dragon burst into a raven. “Where’d you learn that?” Mauricio asked.

            “Over in Spain. Last semester. Someone in a bar taught me.”

            “You learned all that in one night?”

            “Once you learn how to do the spell, it’s really easy to mod it.” And I showed him how to produce the sparks in such a way that they were linked by the loosest of threads. You didn’t need to control all at once; you needed to control one, and have it wiggle all the sparks around it. You connect and disconnect them based on what you need. It’s like a bike, hard to find your balance at first. We sat there as he sputtered out sparks and tried to connect them, tried to form a rendition of Nearly Headless Nick.

            “You still haven’t told me anything about Spain.”

            “The muggles there are a lot cooler.”

            “Really?”

            “Yeah, at least in the south. Like, all of them just know magic is real, but no one believes them. So like, wizards are just out in the open in so many towns in southern Spain. Not the big cities so much, but I legit went to a dragon farm. They coexist.”

            “That sounds incredible.”

            “I’ve wanted to go back since the day I got back here.”

            Mauricio waved his wand and a fake window appeared in the wall, looking out at a countryside. It was impressive magic. An illusion, no doubt, but an impressive one. “I think this winter break I’m gonna go through the countryside.”

            “It’ll be freezing.”

            “I’m a wizard, Cristopher! I’ll be fine. I have clothes.”

            “What’re you gonna do?”

            “Just hike around. Think about stuff. I’ll bring books.”

            “Books.”

            “I like to read! Lugovitch, Metusch.”

            “How highbrow.”

            “That’ll be real survival skill. What you wanna learn.”

            He was right. Going out in the wild, surviving only on what we could find. “Am I invited?” I asked. A formality.

            “Of course, as long as you don’t cheat. No bringing food, and you’re not allowed to bring an expanding bigger-on-the-inside bullshit.”

            “The weed garden?”

            “Exception, and it is only allowed to store weed and weed-related devices. I have to maintain it, but I can store the weed forever and sell it when we get back. I could sell it at a discounted price, honestly. Make food outta this shit. Sell butter. Sell butter to the house elves! Ha! They would fucking love that shit, getting fucking stoned off chicken parm or fucking uhh I dunno, some nice basil and arugula salad, drizzle on some weed olive oil, some salt.”

            “Holy shit, shut the fuck up.”

            “They love that shit, remember? Damn, I honestly would just toss them the shit, I don’t wanna make them pay. My donation to the Hogwarts kitchen staff.”

            “Let’s go donate.”

            “Fucking, let’s go.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Christopher can't sleep because of acid. Mauricio randomly shows up with a friend. They witness a possession?

I couldn’t sleep, so I went to the astronomy tower. I stared off into the Forbidden Forest without my glasses and felt very despondent. The colors blurred and slipped from one another, merging, morphing with the sky. I only ever got strong visuals on acid once, but my hearing always got fucked up. I always heard mutterings, whisperings, as if I moved just a bit closer to them, I would be able to distinguish words. But it was always just the wind, the trees, birds chirping, a fan. I heard it even then, and I ignored it. Remain calm – that was the first rule for anything. Was it the wind? No, there was no wind, it was a particularly tranquil night on top of the castle. Was it the trees? Obviously not, if there were no wind. The wood panels creaking? Probably, but there was something other than that.

            “Yeah, like… a dub is just… two dimes.”

            “Oh.”

            “Yeah, that’s like…”

            “I thought it was like, one-point-five grams.”

            “No, that’s fucking dumb.”

            People. Real people. The voice: monotone, gravelly, obnoxious. Two pairs of feet moving up the stairs, towards me.

            “Christopher?”

            “Yo, Mauricio.”

            “The fuck?” he asked.

            “I couldn’t sleep.”

            “Acid?”

            “Acid.”

            “This is Lucas,” he said. “Lucas, this is Christopher. We’re about to smoke. Come join.”

            I got up and followed them to the other end of the astronomy tower, away from where the memorials were. Mauricio took out a blunt and lit it silently, and then passed it to Christopher. “Lucas was telling me about a cult that has recently sprung up on campus.”

            Lucas nodded pseudo-wisely. “In the dungeons. It’s weird. They’ll just sit in a random classroom and use weird magic to speak to the dead.

“Dark Magic?” I asked.

            “Not the Darkest.”

            “I feel like messing with Death is sketchy, dude. I dunno.”

            “You’re still tripping?” Mauricio asked me.

            I never knew how to answer that, but I said, “Sure.”

            “It’ll be sick,” he said. “You’ll feel mad spiritual.”

            “Do they really talk to the dead?”

            Lucas nodded. Mauricio shrugged. That was it: he wanted to know if they really spoke to the dead. Arcane shit like that always interested him. Why would I ever want to expose myself to those virulent Dark Magics? There is no use contacting the dead – the one place where rest is promised, and it is our job to maintain that promise. The last great mystery of life, transcended by the great Harry Potter, who refuses to talk about his time over there on the other side, beyond the green light. For the better, I say, but I have seen Mauricio struggle with holding back questions about death whenever Harry Potter came to lecture. I worried he would one day slip up on his manners, ask forbidden questions, the type of shit that gets your mind fucked up by otherworldly Lovecraftian terrors. If not that, at the least, he’ll look like an asshole.

            “Okay, I’ll come,” I said. So we finished up the blunt and descended to the basement. Sometimes I caught Mauricio swooshing his wand a bit, trying to apparate, as if he could catch the anti-apparition charm at its weakest and slip through it.

            The smell of weed was almost nauseating when we reached the classroom in the basement. Mauricio rolled his eyes and muttered a few spells to clear up the smell. I swept my wand back and forth across the hallway, charming different smells into existence: vanilla and mulberry and hazelnut. Sometimes I thought about recording all of the smells that Mauricio and I had created. And then the other boy, Lucas, started tossing his wand around to, flipping out mediocre smells, the kind that soured quickly, the kind Mauricio and I had started off making long ago. Mauricio rolled his eyes again. Before they entered the classroom, I saw Mauricio flick Lucas’ scents away without him noticing.

            “Ahh, we have new observers, come to see what we necromancers are up to.”

            “Necromancers?” Mauricio repeated quietly to me.

            The room was lit by a few orbs of light in each corner, and in the center was a large cauldron with orange liquid boiling on a blue-hot flame. “You may observe us communicate with our ancestors,” one of them said, but I couldn’t tell which person. About a dozen of them, all wearing black cloth covering everything except their eyes. They were all busy doing duties: cutting up ingredients that were occasionally tossed into the cauldron, reading, whispering spells into the cauldron, whispering spells over a chalice. Mauricio stared at them all with huge eyes like amulets, the fire reflecting gold in his amber eyes.

            We sat in one of the corners, the three of us, and we watched them prepare the potion. None of them spoke, and I couldn’t work up the courage to speak. I was falling asleep, if anything.

            One of them dipped ripped off the cloth from their mouth, but they were facing away from us. No one looked at their face. They dipped their hand in the cauldron, into the boiling potion, and scooped some of it into their mouth. Mauricio had a hand over the opening of his pocket, the way he sat when he felt in danger, when he felt he would need to pull his wand quickly. I held my wand tightly against my thigh.

            The person that drank the potion looked up at the ceiling. The lights in the corners of the rooms went out, and I heard Mauricio pull out his wand. I could hear only my own heart.

            And then wind, flowing into the room from pockets into other realms. Cold, descending like invisible snow. The potion glowed softly, just enough to show the dark silhouette of the person in front of it, still staring up at the ceiling. A voice spoke, barely perceptible: “Why have you reached into our world?” it asked.

            “We seek guidance,” the same voice replied, but the intonation was different. The first did not have respect; the latter was reverent. Bodily possession. Muggle television shows, they always get it wrong. Why would a possessed person’s voice change? Does the demon or ghost or spirit or whatever modify the person’s vocal cords? Of course not. Possessed people sound just like themselves, that’s why it’s so awful and terrifying – how do you know if someone’s really been let go of by this other thing?

            “I guess I believe this shit now,” I said to Mauricio.

            “Don’t be so quick,” he said. “Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.”

            They were speaking again: “And you believe that I can guide you?”

            “We believe that you have access to information that would be beneficial to us. Magic that we are not able to reach in this institution.”

            “Hogwarts?” Laughter. “You do not believe that Hogwarts has enough resources?”

            “It is not how it once was. It is not the great institution of learning that it had once been. During that golden period, the golden period that you must have been part of, it was believed that Hogwarts had always been such a wonderful institution. But it’s untrue. There have been ups and downs. One of the founders was literally a fascist – it takes years to undo the damage from that kind of trauma.”

            “What resources do you need?”

            “Magic. Our professors are weak, they are not erudite, they are not scholars. They want money, they want time for their own research.”

            “They wish to fulfill their own dreams. Is that so wrong?”

            The kid didn’t respond. I became colder. “But… if they are a teacher, they are giving up their life to promise future generations greater circumstances than they once had.”

            “It is not their responsibility to do anything. No one has any obligation to anyone or anything, child.”

            The potion bubbled higher, threatening to boil over. “But… no. I refuse to believe that. Energy must be sacrificed to produce greater things – more energy must be put it if a greater society is desired, and that includes sacrificing oneself sometimes. Some people have to sacrifice more than others. It is life.”

            “Would you sacrifice yourself – your dreams, rather – for the greater good?”

            “How much would it advance humanity?”

            “An unquantifiable amount, just as much as a teacher may advance society.”

            Again, the kid was stumped.

            “Okay, let’s get out of here,” Mauricio whispered.

            “What do you mean?” I asked. “It’s just getting good, this is interesting. I’m pretty into this. I didn’t know we had a debate club.”

            Before I could protest, he grabbed my arm. Lucas followed close behind us, and we exited the classroom just as the kid started to say, “I’m not really a fan of Ayn Rand, but I’ll invoke her here to…”

            “Why’re we leaving?” I asked.

            Mauricio was making long strides down the hall, back towards the stairs. He held up a pouch and said, “I just wanted the potion. It gives you a crazy high, apparently.”

            “Wait, he was just high?”

            “I’m pretty sure. I can’t imagine that the afterlife is actually real.”

            “What about Harry Potter?”

            Mauricio shook his head. “Dude, that shit’s fake as fuck.”

            “What?”

            “He’s not saying anything about it cuz it’s like, he just didn’t see anything. He blacked out for a little bit, the magic in his body like, tried to figure out what the fuck was happening. There were like, a ridiculous amount of old ass magics all up in his system, and then all of a sudden this green death ray just like, fucked shit up. So he passed out for a bit, and maybe he had a weird dream, and then everything evened out and his body realized that everything equals one again and he wakes up and so does Voldy and bam. No afterlife.” We were breathless by the time we reached the top of the stairs. “Fucking backwoods,” he grunted. “I can feel myself getting cancer.”

            “You really don’t believe there’s something beyond?”

            “Not something we can reach.”

            “Fuck,” Lucas said. “I’m going the fuck to bed.”

            “Was that too weird?” asked Mauricio.

            “I dunno. I was hoping – well, my aunt’s dead, yanno? I wanted to try to…”

            “Oh shit,” Mauricio said. “Yeah, sorry for taking that dream away from you.”

            Lucas left. “Who was he?” I asked.

            “Just a customer.”

            “You just like, chill with them?”

            We walked into the Great Hall and sat down at the Ravenclaw table. “Sometimes,” he said. “Shit got boring without you, dude. He’s okay. Kinda weird. He says the n-word sometimes, so I like, hex his underwear to stick to just one spot on his ass so he rips out a shitton of hair. And he buys a shitton of weed from me.”

            “That’s sick, dude.”

            “Anyway, you still really haven’t told me about how your whole last year was. What the fuck happened? Where were you?”

            I said, “I just left.”

            “I’m aware. I got the letter.”

            “Yeah… sorry I didn’t write sooner.”

            “I thought you killed yourself, dude.”

            I shook my head. “No. I just… I can’t stay in one place anymore, dude. I’m so sick of this. I’m sick of this homogeny. That kid – I don’t care if he was high or talking to dead people or demons or whatever, he was right. Hogwarts has turned into a fucking shithole. I’ve learned more by myself than anything else. I’ve learned so much through just smoking.”

            Mauricio nodded slowly. “You’re right. We’re damned good at smelling charms.”

            “Fuck yeah. And our dueling skills – shit, dude, after I’m fucking rested, we have to fucking duel. I’ve learned so much, there is so much out there.”

            “But where?”

            “Everywhere, man,” I told him. “Mauricio, I can’t even begin to say.”

            “Where did you go when you immediately left your house?”

            “Madrid. I thought, I might as well go somewhere I know the language. And then I went south to Andalusia. There were castles in the middle of these giant, open plains, Mauricio. They were beautiful, jutting out from the landscape like giant boulders. The magic in them was old, Mauricio, older and more powerful than I had ever felt. We learn so little of magic here, Mauricio, we learn so little of how to become connected to the very forces that supply us with these powers.”

            Mauricio was smiling. “Let’s leave,” he said.

            I clenched and unclenched my fists, staring down at the table. “I will,” I said, catching his eyes suddenly. “I’ll leave right now. All I need to do is pack and a backpack, and I’ll leave with you. We can discover our magics the way that our ancestors did, in nature.”

            I couldn’t read Mauricio’s eyes.

            “This summer,” he promised. “This summer we leave.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'll recommend a book: the god of small things by arundhati roy. probably one of the best books i've ever read. i do not doubt that my writing style does try to emulate some of her techniques, but i obviously can't accomplish much in a harry potter fanfic lmao


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